Top 5: Online Outrage
Plus: Nonviolence and UN peacekeepers
The Top 5 for your week:
“‘Likes’ and ‘shares’ teach people to express more outrage online” (YaleNews)
Because social media provides its own incentive structure that then influences real decisions in the real world.
Social media platforms like Twitter amplify expressions of moral outrage over time because users learn such language gets rewarded with an increased number of “likes” and “shares,” a new Yale University study shows.
And these rewards had the greatest influence on users connected with politically moderate networks.
“Could the U.S. government take nonviolence seriously?” (Sojourners)
Because this essay posits an important question: is nonviolence an effective and strategic policy choice and what is the role of religious communities in peacebuilding?
But according to nonviolent activists, academics, and policy experts, violent intervention and retribution has never been the only option. Though these experts are aware that nonviolence is often viewed as impractical or ineffective — especially in geopolitical crises — they insist that the moral and practical arguments are on their side.
“What this moment in time teaches us is that war does not work,” said Lisa Schirch, senior fellow with the Alliance for Peacebuilding and a visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute. “There's no evidence that any amount of firepower or money could have changed this situation. Everything was thrown at Afghanistan that could be thrown at it in terms of a military solution.” Nonviolence, she said, is a strategic choice for effectiveness.
“UN Peacekeepers Fathered Dozens Of Children In Haiti. The Women They Exploited Are Trying To Get Child Support.” (BuzzFeed News)
Because in conversations and analyses surrounding Afghanistan and what we can do to alleviate the humanitarian crisis, UN peacekeeping is often posed as the solution. But BuzzFeed recently discovered major problems with sexual assault and paternity issues wrought by UN peacekeepers in Haiti and elsewhere over the decades.
The problem of peacekeepers sexually abusing or exploiting local women is not unique to Haiti — there have been 1,143 allegations since 2007, across at least a dozen countries, according to the database. But Haiti, one of the world’s poorest countries, has endured multiple scandals, including a sex ring in which more than 130 peacekeepers from Sri Lanka exploited nine Haitian children, according to an investigation by the Associated Press. It wasn’t until 2015 that the UN began requiring peacekeepers’ home countries to certify that deployed military personnel had no prior allegations of human rights violations, according to the UN spokesperson.
“How 9/11 Changed…” (Washington Post Magazine)
Because Washington Post Magazine talked to 28 experts and asked how 9/11 changed all kinds of areas of life like fashion, books, theatre, travel, and more. The following quote, from Philip Kennicott, reflects on the changes in architecture:
First came the jersey barriers, a provisional defense against car bombs. Then came the bollards, permanent incursions on the built environment. Older buildings suffered most, their front doors closed, their atria clogged with magnetometers and barking security guards. Architectural symbolism was expendable. We enter the Supreme Court not via the grand front stairs but through side entrances, and the Capitol is accessed through an underground visitors center.
Paranoia was programmed into new structures. The tower that replaced the twin towers is built on a giant, windowless concrete plinth. U.S. embassies were rebuilt outside city centers, forlorn, generic buildings surrounded by moats of empty land. The United States said the quiet part aloud: We’re scared.
“‘I Helped Destroy People’” (NYT)
Because this piece focuses on the policy aftermath of 9/11, i.e. the War on Terror and follows an FBI agent who leaked classified documents because he saw damage being done, especially with government surveillance of Muslim-Americans.
There was nothing connecting the kid to terrorism. Albury knew this after spending months completing a process known as “baseline collection”: scouring his social media, checking his phone records, running his name through the D.M.V. database as well as myriad other secret and top-secret government databases. But now his name was in the system. That meant any number of government agencies — the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the D.E.A., ICE — could have access to his file. Albury had recruited too many informants found in precisely this manner not to understand that what he’d done by simply looking at Adaki’s brother was to open him up to future harassment or, at best, put an asterisk next to his name that would be with him forever. Now, any time he applied for a passport, or a job that required a background check, or a driver’s license, or simply had his name run through any sort of government database, for the rest of his life, it would show up that he’d been looked at by the F.B.I., which would inevitably be viewed as suspicious. That was what was so insidious about the process, Albury thought. And it wasn’t just this kid — there were thousands of Minneapolis Muslims in the system just like him and untold millions elsewhere in the country.